Dear Otus, “My lord, I thought it was 1958 all over again. I looked around for the ‘Whites Only’ water fountain.”
And so began a handwritten note on ecru stationery I received this week from a Yankee transplant who is not yet accustomed to our Southern fauna here in Arkansas.
It was not wholly a pleasure to receive it, but it is to enlighten and inform her.
Faithful readers of the past three-plus decades will recall that it states high up in the Ancient Order of Caput Feles mission statement that “all Head Cats shall strive to illuminate, elucidate, educate and inform.”
Clarity is our calling, for ignorance is the bane of civility. However, ignorance, unlike stupidity, can be cured.
If, to paraphrase the poet Thomas Gray, ignorance is bliss, then there are certainly a lot of blissful people taking up space and watching Jerry Springer and Keeping Up With the Kardashians. For others, ignorance is an athema, in the original Greek sense of athema. If it is the truth that shall set you free, then surely it is ignorance that shall shackle your soul, fetter your felicity and bind your bowels.
But we should not eschew the ignorant. Some are born ignorant, some achieve ignorance, and some have ignorance thrust upon them. It is how we respond to ignorance that sets us apart. No one is to be pitied more than the ignorant person who refuses to acknowledge his ignorance and strive for erudition.
It is in that spirit that I respond to the letter from an ignorant person. She is also an ignorant Yankee person who, in her golden years, has had the great good sense to hie herself to our fair state.
Aside: My fellow native Arkansans, we should not unequivocally condemn those who have had the misfortune to be born up North. Even Owner’s father experienced this cruel and fickle twist of fate.
Owner’s father (the late Jim Storey) suffered the lifelong indignity of being born in Flint, Mich. - a happenstance that occurred during a misguided 1923 sojourn by his parents, Harry and Cora Crockett Storey of Paragould.
Owner’s paternal grandmother was great with child when they went to look for work in the Flint automobile factories. Following the first blizzard, they returned to Greene County as soon as little Jimmy was old enough to travel.
For the rest of his life, Owner’s father carried that opprobrious albatross and would inform even total strangers, “Yes, I was born in Michigan, but I was conceived on Crowley’s Ridge.”
Somehow, that gave him solace.
Owner’s father was not an ignorant man. He was, in fact, a well-respected attorney back when those words were not an oxymoron. He was living proof that accident of birth need not be a permanent handicap if one is willing to work hard.
Unaside: Therefore, I do believe there is hope for our unfortunate ignorant Yankee transplant. Here is the rest of her letter:
“My husband and I have recently retired to Arkansas after 42 years of living in Indiana.
“We love it here, but we were on the Tanyard Creek Nature Trail last weekend when we overheard one of your backward redneck Arkansas hayseeds cursing the ‘chiggers.’ I thought you Southerners had progressed to tolerance, if not acceptance. I guess I was wrong.”
- Mara Natha Bella Vista
Well, my dear Mara, it is my responsibility and pleasure to inform you that the gentleman you overheard was not cursing any member of the human race, but rather a tiny arthropod. Acarologists note that chiggers are one of two native pests common in the Southern United States.
One is the chigoe flea, but the more common is the tiny larva of the trombiculidae or red harvest mite (Trombicula alfreddugesi).
Both cause a rash and terrible itching. The recent warmer weather has brought out the season’s first chiggers, much to the discomfort of outdoor enthusiasts.
Granted, in order to sidestep any pejorative misunderstanding, more educated Southerners (those with a high school diploma or GED) no longer call the pest “chigger,” but rather the more socially acceptable “chigra.”
An attempt to control the ubiquitous Southern irritant took place in the 1970s with the importation of thousands of the mite-eating strepsirrhine lemuriform primate, the Bosman potto from central Africa.
The eradication program failed because the creatures never prospered in the wild and preferred to simply sit on the shoulders of humans and groom the mites from their scalps. The only pottos remaining in the United States are in the Memphis Zoo.
Until next time, Kalaka reminds you that now that you know, go and sin no more.
Disclaimer Fayetteville-born Otus the Head Cat’s award-winning column of humorous fabrication appears every Saturday. E-mail:
HomeStyle, Pages 36 on 04/20/2013